The Early Asimov. Volume 2

'What's this?'

Tubal scowled. 'Is that what I've been sitting on all this while? It's a weld-gun that I used to fix up a meteor puncture in our ship. It's no good; power's almost-gone."

Williams' eyes kindled. His whole body galvanized with excitement.

'That's what you think! You Galaxy men never could see farther than your noses. Why don't you come down to Earth for a spell - and get a new point of view?'

Williams was ru

'Sweeney,' he howled, 'you tell that damned monkey-tailed chief that in just about one second, I'm going to get sore and pull the whole sky down over his head. Get tough!'

But the chief did not wait for the message. He gestured defiance and the natives made a united rush. Tubal roared, and his muscles cracked against the bonds. The weld-gun in William's hand flared into life, its feeble power beaming outward.

The nearest native hut went up in sudden flames. Another followed - and another - and the fourth - and then the weld-gun went dead.

But it was enough. Not a native remained standing. All were groveling on their faces, wailing and shrieking for pardon. The chief wailed and shrieked loudest of all.

Tell the chief,' said Williams to Sweeney, 'that that's just a little, insignificant sample of what we're thinking of doing to him!'

To the Humanoids, as he cut the rawhide holding them, he added complacently,

'Just some simple, ordinary savage psychology.'

It was only after they were back in their ship and off in space again that Forase locked up his pride.

'But I thought Earthmen had never developed mathematical psychology! How did you know all that sub-Humanoid stuff? No one in the Galaxy has got that far yet!' 'Well,' Williams gri

Forase nodded slowly. 'You screwball Earthmen! At least, this little episode has taught us all one thing.'

'What's that?'

'Never,' said Forase, dipping a second time into Earth slang, 'get tough with a bunch of nuts. They may be nuttier than you think!'

 In going through my stories while preparing this book, I found 'The Hazing' to be the only published story concerning which I could remember nothing from the title alone. Even as I reread it, nothing clicked. If I had been given the story without my name on it and had been asked to read it and guess the author, I would probably have been stumped. Maybe that means something.

 It does seem to me, though, that the story is set against a 'Homo Sol' background.

 I had better luck with Fred Pohl with another story, 'Super-Neutron,' which I wrote at the end of the same February in which I did 'Masks' and 'The Hazing.' I submitted it to him on March 3, 1941, and he accepted it on March 5.

 By that time, less than three years after my first submission, I was clearly becoming rather impatient with rejections. At least, the news of the acceptance of 'Super-Neutron' is greeted in my diary with an 'It's about time I made a sale - five and a half weeks since the last one.'

Super-Neutron [9]

It was at the seventeenth meeting of the Honorable Society of Ananias that we got the greatest scare of our collective lives and consequently elected Gilbert Hayes to the office of Perpetual President.

The Society is not a large one. Before the election of Hayes there were only four of us: John Sebastian, Simon Murfree, Morris Levin and myself. On the first Sunday of every month we met at luncheon, and on these monthly occasions justified our Society's title by gambling the di

It was quite a complicated process, with strict Parliamentary rules. One member spun a yarn each meeting as his turn came up, and two conditions had to be adhered to. His story had to be an outrageous, complicated, fantastic lie; and, it had to sound like the truth. Members were allowed to - and did -attack any and every point of the story by asking questions or demanding explanations.

Woe to the narrator who did not answer all questions immediately, or who, in answering, involved himself in a contradiction. The di

And then came that seventeenth meeting - and Gilbert Hayes. Hayes was one of several non-members who attended occasionally to listen to the after-di

Di

I frowned, 'In the eyes of the Society you are non-existent, Mr. Hayes. It is impossible for you to take part.'

'Then just let me make a statement,' he rejoined. The Solar System is coming to an end at exactly seventeen and a half minutes after two this afternoon.'

There was a devil of a stir, and I looked at the electric clock over the television receiver. It was 1.14 p.m.

I said hesitantly, 'If you have anything to substantiate that extraordinary statement, it should be most interesting. It is Mr. Levin's turn today, but if he is willing to waive it, and if the rest of the Society agrees -'

Levin smiled and nodded, and the others joined in.

I banged the gavel, 'Mr. Hayes has the floor.'

Hayes lit his cigar and gazed at it pensively. 'I have little more than an hour, gentlemen, but I'll start at the begi

He paused, and continued in a different tone, 'You know, it is strange that with all our scientific advance in the last two centuries we have never found either that mysterious source or the equally mysterious reason for the explosion of a star. They are the two eternal puzzles and we know as little about them today as we did in the days of Einstein, Eddington and Milli-kan.

'Still, as I say, I thought I had the cosmic ray by the tail, so I set out to check my ideas by observation, as for that I had to go out in space. It wasn't, however, as easy as all that. It was in 2129, you see, just after the last war, and the Observatory was about broke - as weren't we all?

'I made the best of it. I hired an old second-hand '07 model, piled my apparatus in and set out alone. What's more, I had to sneak out of port without clearance papers, not wishing to go through the red tape the occupation army would have put me through. It was illegal, but I wanted my data - so I headed out at a right angle to the ecliptic, in the direction of the South Celestial Pole, approximately, and left Sol a billion miles behind me.

'The voyage I made, and the data I collected are unimportant. I never reported one or the other. It was the planet I found that makes the story.'

At this point, Murfree raised those bushy eyebrows of his and grunted, 'I would like to warn the gentleman, Mr. Chairman. No member has yet escaped with his skin with the phony planet.'

Hayes smiled grimly, 'I'll take my chance. - To continue; it was on the eighteenth day of my trip that I first detected the planet, and as a little orange disc the size of a pea. Naturally, a planet in that region of space is something of a sensation. I headed for it; and immediately discovered that I had not even scratched the surface of that planet's queerness. To exist there at all was phenomenal - but it likewise possessed absolutely no gravitational field.'

[9] Astonishing Stories, September 1941 Copyright © 1941 by Fictioneers, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1968 by Isaac Asimov